Loves Comes to Town
by Squingili
Summary: Arthur Kirkland has been making his way through the United States (sitting in cars and buses and trains, downing all sorts of alcohol, sleeping in unfamiliar beds, and sleeping with unfamiliar people) for over three years. He's been running from Alfred F. Jones for only one of them. (Eventual USUK). Inspired by "When Loves Comes to Town" by U2 and B.B. King. Now with an epilogue.
1. i and ii

**Title: **love comes to town

**Author: **squingili

**Pairing:** Arthur Kirkland (England) x Alfred F. Jones (America)

**Warnings: **Language, non-graphic sex, unhealthy lifestyles, etc.

**Summary:** Arthur Kirkland has been making his way through the United States (sitting in cars and buses and trains, downing all sorts of alcohol, sleeping in unfamiliar beds, and sleeping with unfamiliar people) for over three years. He's been running from Alfred F. Jones for only one of them. Inspired by the song "When Loves Comes to Town" by U2 and B.B. King

**Disclaimer: **All copyrighted materials from this work of _fanfiction_ belong to their respective copyright holders. These include, but are not limited to, the characters of Axis Powers Hetalia.

**Note:** This is less a love story and more a story about moving forward, wherein love may or may not play an important role. Alfred's appearances are minimal, all the way to the end.

You have been warned.

**i. under a red sunset**

The only beginning in this is an explanation:

There are two things that you will know forever: your duffel bag and him. One is physical, the other is _there _touching the fringes of your mind – but they are one and the same in the end, when the touch becomes a prod at the back of your mind, and the physical is in your hand, filled with clothes and too much money.

When _he _threatens to become the physical, you chase a train out of town with the ease of years, slipping into a seat next to a blonde with bowed lips and blue eyes. She's got a ring on her finger, and you ask, you _always_ ask, and she will tell you that she is getting married that weekend.

Three days are enough – you stay – for her to get used to the smell of your smokes, and for a heat to curl beneath her skin and grip her and turn her into your arms.

Because she is soon high beneath you, glowing red in the sunset, sweat undoing the soft curls. Because the ceremony will go on in the evening – it is odd, and convenient. Because her eyes are half-lidded, foggy with sated lust, and her white dress on the floor is stained from the dying sun.

In your years of mindless travel, there had been no afterglow in someone else's skin. Just a fever when you're inside, or someone's inside you, heavy and hazy. They're all beautiful like that, when you can't see them for what they are: they don't have lives beyond their bodies, and their bodies are now beneath, astride you.

But if the sex is good, you just might stay.

And you're thinking about it, looking at her. Lie low for a few days: the honeymoon's at a hotel just outside of town, and then she'll settle and burn for you again, for the sin in pleasure. You begin to lean down to her ear and lie – _i'll stay however long you like, love._ Everything about it is a lie, but she'll fall in love with the words.

And just as your lips touch her skin, your chest burns anew, and it surges along your skin like static until it enters the nerves and _he is there inside your mind, driving into town and looking for you, and he's got _The Eagles _on the radio_.

You leave her standing, her yellow curls deflated and her make-up smudged. You catch the first train out until the buildings and the houses are lost from the horizon, lost in the black stars. Much like you: lost at sea, caught under the waves and fading from the eyes of strangers before they ever considered remembering.

In the night, you count your blessings (cash), and figure you have enough to go on for another two months before you'd really have to stop and make a call to your editor to pick up the money that still keeps coming in – when you hauled ass and fell into that first bus from New York to Boston, there had been more. There had been deadlines and red pens; the fame and success that came with your name on a million book covers.

_"Kirkland breaks out with a book filled to the brim __with the ache for life in these times: a deep desire for __movement, heat, and freedom." _– The Guardian

_"Yet another modern masterpiece from __one of the world's best authors: new, __refreshing, characters with bottomless __personalities – they live the dreams __we scarcely dare to consider today." __– _The New York Times

_They are real, and all would envy them. __I love them, I covet them: I loathe them. __I want to be them. I want to run, hide, __to shag, to drink, and to leave you all __in the dust and break from this world. _–Arthur Kirkland

* * *

**ii.** **now that you have my attention**

Setting off for nowhere is probably the stupidest thing you've ever done, and you've been doing it for three years. But it is the best you've ever felt – it was away from the grey skies over London, and the rush in the Underground. There was no more sitting behind a desk in the day, working for an accounting firm, and sitting in bed at night, typing into an ancient laptop.

In the words you strung out and dried, there had been people. They had been white-collared or trapped or sad and they had gone on an adventure when there weren't any left to be had in the world, and they had loved someone: they _lived_.

And you had wanted that so _badly_ it _hurt_.

Getting published had been enough, for a while. And then you moved to New York.

Wrote some more.

Got published.

Signed some books.

Replied to fan mail.

Went home to write.

Stepping into that bus to Atlantic City had merely been an impulse trip – you'd intended to come back the next day. That changed when you finally felt the _thrill_ of falling, of seeing the familiar whip past the windows, forgotten in the dust, you were _hooked_.

[You did go home. To pack your things. To tell your editor not to expect shit from you for the next few god-knows-how-many weeks. To blackmail your flatmate into staying in the same building until you came back. To say goodbye to your cat.]

You like never having to feed a cat or buying groceries for the week. You like the different people in this country and how their voices and accents differ based on the number of kilometers between them – and they like you back, based on the number of hotel rooms you've played host in.

The hotel you've just set up camp in is shabby, and the town was full of water sewn into the wind: definitely not the worst you've been in. It's all about location, see: you'd be here for just a night, maybe two, and head to a city, for a change in scenery. Besides, right across the street are some seedy clubs that you look into.

Later.

You suppose that you might be tired. You lay down, and you realize that you've felt tired for a while: there's an ache in your legs and a feeling deep in your skull that your brain doesn't know where to sit anymore.

You can't sleep.

In a thousand books, there's a character that lies in bed and stares at the cracks in the ceiling, debating with himself, the possibilities of choices and people streaming through his mind. He'd stay there for forever – an hour, a minute, a day – and he'd decide what to do with himself. He'd decide what he is and who he is and what he wants.

So this is what you do instead.

You take a scalding shower and lean against the tile on the wall, remembering the first bus, and watching the land flash past your window, and the feeling of flight once you had stepped out to Atlantic City and realized that you had absolutely no idea what you were doing there.

You remember the first phone call – two years later.

The man behind the bar had held out the phone to you, and you put it against your ear as the bass of a guitar had thrummed and became the room's entire pulse. There was yelling and singing. It was loud, much too loud, and you shouldn't have heard the voice on the other end.

But you did.

The voice called itself Alfred, and that he and you would fall in love because it was fate. He spoke it like it was the gospel, and he had been there when they had crucified the Lord, held the holy grail and caught the blood.

No question: it is the most terrifying phone call that you have ever received.

He said many things – that any random number you'd call, it would probably reach him. That any dollar bill you'd give to anyone would end up in his hand, sooner or later. That he knows everything and nothing about you: only that you haven't stopped moving since you left New York, but you were lonely, looking for him without knowing it.

He said he was sorry for being absent. Sorry for not being your first kiss or sex or anything. For not even knowing about you for years or reading a single one of your books until just recently, when his brother had sent it to him for their shared birthday.

_But now_, _I'm going to make it up to you, Arthur._

_I'm gonna find you._

He said it so _earnestly_, and you felt something hot poke _up_ your spine and take center stage on your chest: your heart beat fast in your ears, your breath pushed hard past your lips.

You didn't like that.

Not at all.

You informed him of your lifestyle – of the sex and the alcohol – and that you were completely happy with it. Never mind that he was a stranger who knew too much about you and was tripping over himself to find you and make you his.

You hung up.

You wondered why there were so many sick fucks in the world, so many people who believed in property and destiny. How dare that man, that _boy_, stake a claim on you? What did he know about how you were meant to live? What did he know about the happiness you make out of movement, out of solitude?

He knows _nothing_, and he isn't worth your time.

You returned to the man you'd been chatting up. The sex later that night had been good. Even now, you shiver at the thought of it, standing now beneath the shower's line of fire.

But when you step out of the bathroom, towel around your waistthe room seems bare, as if you're missing some piece of furniture. And then you wanted to hold something. A cat, maybe. You miss Henry sometimes.

But you don't go out tonight, and you just watch television in your room.

You feel that man moving across the map, and it is in that moment, somewhere between a rerun of _Wheel of Fortune_ and a soap opera, that you know that he hadn't been lying when he said that he was going to love you.

In the buzz of static, you watch persons on the screen, surrounded by people. That is life. Persons are always different from people. A person's face is defined and named, and people stand where you could see, but never know.

The world is full of people, and they are all nameless.

And in the seconds the receiver clashed against its cradle in that club so many months ago, a person had emerged from the anonymity. His name is Alfred.


	2. iii and iv

**Note: **Thank you to those who've added this to their alerts and to aphrodite931, who reviewed! Any sort of feedback is awesome, really - but please drop a fuse or a beat or something, whether it's about how my style is too flowery, or how slowly this story is moving. It gets awfully lonely on this side of the world.

* * *

**iii. all the manners i've been taught**

From the beginnings of time, you had spent much of your time in make-believe: the people on television had lives that you liked to color, and the places and shapes would rise from their foundations to fill your mindscape. There would be people, and they would be like you, in some way – they would like tea, they would always carry about an umbrella, and they would speak your language. Theatre (sewn-together bits of reality made beautiful and ugly on a wide stage) would be in their veins, and so would Shakespeare and Dickens (even if they've never picked up their stories in memory). They were the people who lived in your mind, and you were the person that they made up, that they would form – they would unite under one banner and create you.

And in your arrogance, you accepted their histories.

You wrote them down, in your name.

You thought it made you happy to live as their land – you are a country of dreams in yourself, hidden by mist and rain and rock. You thought you could be content, watching your imagined people live. But the world that you saw when you emerged from your cave was beautiful – more beautiful than the world that your fantasies had made you. This new world is rich in its decadence of detail and insignificance.

There are snatchings of sunlight on the nape of someone's neck, millions of grains of sand running between your fingers scattered by the wind and touched back to the earth. There are leaves, and their veins; fingers, and the nerves running through the seams of flesh. The precise shade of red of a man's scarf, the number of bolts on a bridge, the candles of adoration and prayer filled with a multitude of stories that will never be revealed.

The dreams are not enough to satisfy thoughts of movement across a map. The lives of the dreams you held in your mind's eye could no longer hold your own desire to live.

You think. You travel. You see new strangers and new spheres of universe in the people around you. You take no photographs, but memorize freedom in your senses: touch, sight, smell, sound, taste – chase after experience, sensation.

Then you chase after feeling, emotions – you chase lust across a dim room, find euphoria at the end of a joint while the music colors the air, cling to helpless excitement as you fall through the sky (a man with a parachute grinning and clinging to your back), burn in rage as you watch the people die and weep on the news, and trace the beginnings of jealousy as man and woman all around _still seem so much happier than you_.

There is nothing wrong. This is happiness.

You keep going.

* * *

**iv. the notes turning blue**

You like music on certain days, and this is one of them.

New Orleans is a kingdom, and it's ancient in its own way. Most cities are. When there are new buildings, the old ones become old, and people stop calling them new. That's the way things work, and you like the way buildings mesh in the bigger city names, these days.

The air is wet and heavy, and you've run into the lit sea: there are the crashes of drums and the songs of saxophones. You walk alone, cigarette in hand, and it's only when you hear a guitar scream that you step into a club and sit in the music.

This juke joint's dim, stuck somewhere in the Eighties. The band up on stage is high on secondhand smoke; the rhythm and beats thrum with your pulse, and sweeping the breath from your lips for life. Your fingers curl and tap on a table for purchase, feeling for the guitar that you left behind in New York – the grain on the table fuels the movement, the kinetics of a desire to _play_.

You're dazing in a dream: once in a land far far away, there was an ancient kingdom birthed in sound and guitars, where the smokes were nearly free and the water burned down the base of your throat to your core and men and women touched each other like sex. There's a wandering knight, fallen from grace, tracing the lines of cobble with his feet, and a hand splays across his chest and lips blow highness into yours. One man, two men, lead you into the dark and undo the armors and balm the wounds until they are unseen with _[—a map of the United States spread on the shotgun seat. Headlights glow like the moon over Bourbon Street and there is a grin on Alfred's face that you cannot see in the darkness—] _the swell of drunkenness in your gut.

The world is black and touch, lipstick and _pull me across the statelines, Arthur, and I will follow_. Your fingers move across his skin and you press into him until the stars are alight with pleasure and you fall to the bed only to be called again with legs straddling your waist and your neck reclaimed. Dark and light until the high melts away with the sweat on your skin.

And again, you are in a hotel room staring at the cracks in the ceiling, debating with yourself, the possibilities of choices and people streaming through your mind. You stay there for forever – an hour, a minute, a day – and you try to decide what to do with yourself. You try to decide what you are and who you are and what you want.

You cannot fall to sleep, as you intended. The man (two?) is sated, boneless against the hotel's sheets, his blue eyes closed. He is less now than he is when those eyes are open, though you can't quite explain why. You long something terrible for blue eyes reflected in the sky, golden hair, and taut, tanned skin.

There is a dip somewhere in your chest, pulling back the way you came, past humidity. Somewhere in your mind, there is loud music and soda. There is blond hair and warm skin in the dark, pulling through the night and the statelines to find you and love you right. It has no face, but it has a purpose and a name.

It scares you, and you admit it, despite your pride and your wrath.

So this is what you do:

You put your clothes back on.

You take your duffel bag.

You leave.


	3. intermission

**intermission. two days later.**

Alfred is screaming down the highway in an ancient pick-up when the sun begins to pulse orange, and he presses down on the speed until the hours turn into minutes: the desert stretches for miles and miles, and the horizon begins with him and ends with Arthur.

He's lived on the road for over two hundred days (over two thousand years) shooting that horizon, running past the carnage and searching for the man he's going to love. There's a pull in his chest that is wild, that is certain, that is—

limited by gasoline.

Alfred pulls over, fills her up, and steps into the little store. He grabs a bottle of soda from the fridge and bags of food from the shelves – feels the girl behind the cashier watching him with green eyes. When he approaches and places his buys on the counter, she asks him what he's doing out wherever-they-were.

"Chasing my love across the desert," he drawls.

"I can't say I've heard _that_ _one_ before," she says, humoring him. "You sure you're not losing it to the heat? No one I've met's ever been crazy enough to drive down the middle of nowhere to find someone."

Alfred leans down on the counter as she presses buttons, bags the food up, and wastes his time, but _hey_, it's not really her fault that he has somewhere to be. He's patient, after all.

"I'm just a _very_ lonely boy, miss."

The little lady jerks to a standstill when he grins. She flushes from the heat of the sun and the eyes that lend only a little of the man chasing Arthur Kirkland across the country.

Alfred's grin is wider when he spots the newspaper crumpled next to her – he sees first the name of a bar and the hick's town it's in, and he remembers the town on his map, just a little ahead of this little gas station: the _pull_ in his chest makes his inhale a bit sharper.

He knows where he's going.

He thanks the cashier, who's still red, and saunters back to his pick-up with his loot, slamming the door a little too hard just as thunder cracks in the distance.

The Eagles resume.

[LIFE IN THE FAST LANE SURELY MAKES YOU LOSE YOUR MIND]


	4. v

**v. love comes to town**

You're in a bar, drink in hand, and you're almost alone: the night hasn't yet begun. The sun is still up, a headier, saturated orange, and a miracle rain is falling – the kind where the drops are heavy, but infrequent. It's heading west, where you had just come from, and there is thunder still in the air: however, darkness had still not fallen.

You've been here for hours, sitting and tapping your feet to the greatest hits of Heart. The bartender (the owner) knows his regulars, and it's a small enough town that he decides to know you; he stands by your side of the bar, deeper in the dim corner, and tells you stories about his travels to the east coast, looking for dolphins and finally finding them just as he started to give up.

You say it's a pleasant story, and then you ask for the telephone. He obliges, and moves to the other side, closer to the door, where three muscled men in their thirties have just walked in. You watch them for a second, and one of them – blond with sharp eyes – watches you.

You grin, and look back down to your drink. It's amber in this light.

There's a movie in your mind when you close your eyes – _he_ is walking, walking in the heated rain, smoke twisting round his legs as the earth hissed its displeasure. He's in the middle of the street, his face hidden from any observers (you) but you feel the burn of his eyes.

The payphone rings, its cry travelling only just so _he _can hear it past the sound of rain. You can feel his grin on your lips when he steps into the booth and picks up the receiver.

"Hello," you say when it's picked up because you know it's him on the other end. The phone burns in your hand _because you know it's him on the other end._

"_Hi_."

The smugness is dripping down his sleeves and onto the floor. It saturates the air with some sort of hidden laughter: not even two words, and you hate it; your back goes straight and your lips go stiff.

You called him. You don't know why or how or what happened.

But your lips know, and your chest burns again: it is a familiar pain when you speak to him. Your skin is hot and cold and rough now, but aware, reaching. In vain, it _senses_, but it cannot touch what it searches for, and it seems to know what it wants before you do.

You ask him,

"Are you all right?"

A pause.

"Well, that's a new one," his voice is pleased, ecstatic at some semblance of concern in your words, if not in your tone, "I'm awesome! You getting tired of hiding from me yet?"

"You're going to have to stop eventually."

"Nope, nope, nope. You're mine, Artie."

"My name is _Arthur_. And we'll have to see about that."

"I'll see _you_ at the Dolphin."

His grin.

Then the dial tone.

Fuck.


	5. vi

**vi. scream a symphony**

There's no question about it: you leave.

You leave because you are terrified, and the owner of the Dolphin has a look on his face that tells you that it shows. You slam down some dollar bills – probably too many – and swallow what's left of the amber in your glass. You need the courage and the burn, but there is no solace from the litany of _fuckfuckfuck_ ripping through your mind.

The owner of the Dolphin lets you leave through the back, and the darkness is welcome because he can no longer see you, and you can no longer see yourself. It is thundering above, and the barrage of rain will protect you from blue eyes (you can no longer deny that that is their color – you know it) as you run to the hotel.

Get the bag and get out. That's the plan.

He can't know where you've paid to stay. There's no way.

He just knows about the Dolphin. Just that.

You don't care much for manners anymore when you enter the tiny hotel, drenched and dripping onto the cheap hardwood. You don't say a word to the old woman behind the desk who'd taken a liking to you when you first arrived and instead stride past her and up the stairs, two steps at a time. The key's in your pocket, and the door opens easily.

You thank Allah, Jesus, Buddha, and Ra that you hadn't bothered unpacking.

Tonight, you spend too much money – on the drinks at the Dolphin, on the room at the hotel, and on the taxi that takes you to the closest airport, miles and miles away. You're still on the road past midnight, the rain a light fall, still airing light and turning it into mist on the windows.

Something roars in your ears, echoing down that narrow path into the mind: your pulse thrums, and you feel terrified and alive. Your hands shake when you don't grip them together. Your chest is ablaze with something that _pulls_ you back where you came, back to the Dolphin, where hands are nursing a glass of whiskey, and lips are speaking things about you with the owner of that bar. There is a voice that drawls out your name, and you hear it as if he is _so close behind you_.

You tell the taxi driver to step on it, and the distance between you and Alfred feels so much like elastic, growing tauter and so much more threatening (to snap, to lift you off your feet and from sheer force of gravity pull you back to the town you've just left). The road back stretches behind you, eventually failing and fading into the blackness challenged only by the lights along the highway.

No line on the horizon.

You make it to the airport, and the rain's already stopped, leaving the dust in the air sticky. When you fall into the fluorescent lights, you realize that this is the first time you've tried to catch a plane since you've started running (from life or from Alfred, you can't quite remember).

Trussing up the charm and persuasion for a ticket for the next plane out feels like a sin, but you ignore that scream. It's him, pressing against your mind and tugging back. It's the duffel bag, swung over your shoulder and burning into your hand.

It's the two of them, and they are all you know.

You're changing the game you hadn't realized you'd been playing – but_ no_, you're absolutely done. No more games. No more cat and mouse. No more leaving behind crumbs. Let the tides wash away the footsteps.

You do not sleep on the airplane. Your hands fidget with your thoughts, turning them over. They itch, the skin and the _ideas_ –

When the words have made themselves known to you, when the ink of the crappy ball-point you nicked from a hotel stains your fingers like blood, there are two napkins marked by your hand sitting on top of little table, pulled down from the seat before you. The woman (_blonde_, how typical) seated next to you lolls her head away from you, asleep: she has not seen that you have written in the dimness and the recycled air.

You shut your eyes, crush them with your hands until the stars are alight beneath your lids, and you can imagine that you are flying away from your troubles. Open again. The blonde is still asleep beside you. Look out of the uncovered window. Search for some star's face to rest upon as the ones imagined in your anguish fade and drift from vision.

Beyond the veiled roaring of the airplane, both earth and sky are black and silent.


	6. vii

**vii. find flaws in science**

You land across the country in hours. New York City hasn't changed much in your absence. The city still growls in its sleep, and the people are still colorful. There's electricity in the air, setting thousands of dreams alight as they mingle, shatter, and realize in romanticized hardship. Happiness and suffering make their homes in cities like this: they masquerade as opposites, but they are one and the same.

This, you think, is limbo. There are too many people, too many individuals, in a constant state of going nowhere. No one will find you here unless you want to be found, and for the first time, you feel truly alone. It is melancholy, but it is liberating. It is easier to forget that you are being chased, though something still feels like rope-burn on your chest.

New York City is a good choice, you tell yourself. Really.

You visit your editor, and he doesn't seem to be angry with you. Contrarily, Yao Wang seems rather pleased: the sales for _Empire _had sky-rocketed once the world had realized that you had gone chasing after your characters in reality. The film adaptations of two of your older books helped, too – _Augustine_ had won a few awards, and _The Roses_ would be up for far more, come the new year. How convenient that you had signed away the rights to the stories before you left – and how convenient that you had come back, because a few more companies were interested in adapting your other books. Perhaps you could come to an agreement about those before you left again.

You say that you have no problem with that, and that you'd be back in the morning. You also say that you've not come up with anything over the years you've been gone.

_Take your time_, Yao replies, waving you out. He looks good, you realize. Much better than he looked the last time you saw him. Success and stability gave the man sharper edges along his fingers. Your disappearance has only done him good. _The world still hasn't forgotten about you. I'd just like to see something sometime the next _decade_, yeah?_

There are two napkins, neatly folded in your jacket pocket. You don't have the heart to throw them away as you walk the streets out. The way is familiar, and _that_ feeling is novel. There are places that have not changed at all, and you see people that you used to know, in another life – you see that business is booming for the bistro a few streets away from your old building: one of the owners (twins that had moved to the city from Italy years ago) is waiting tables cheerily. You hear a laugh from inside, and recognize it as Antonio Fernandez Carriedo's (the bastard).

Across the street, you see two of the Scandinavians who used to live in the flat across the hall – you always assumed they were a couple, though Tino, the shorter and infinitely less terrifying of the duo, would always deny it. They're walking their dog, and take no notice of you.

You walk like a spirit, and in your heart you realize that you are looking for something. Some sort of acknowledgement, though you hardly extend any yourself as you see that young art student sitting on the same bench, sketching away, or that man with a puffin sitting on his shoulder (is that even legal in this country?).

There is no recognition, no notice of more faces in a place like this. No marks to denote existence, or prolonged life. Just thousands of strangers moving across the map and mingling, only to separate and live out the rest of their brief lives.

You take it back: this is a city of ghosts. There is no comfort in being unknown and individual with everyone else – perhaps _that's _why you were never completely happy here or in London. Perhaps _that's_ why you left this place, wrote about absolution and then made it for yourself. Perhaps _that's_ why you felt so happy when you started running – because yes, you were always running, long before Alfred F. Jones had emerged from the masses of people – though you wonder when it was that running began to exhaust you, when flitting across landscapes, hotels, and other cities had stopped making you feel alive.

As you moved across the map, you had become a ghost: running from the bonds of the past, escaping from predetermined futures.

And now, as you walk the streets of a city you decided to escape, you look for some sort of sign, verifying that you had lived here, once upon a time – and you do not find it until you trace your life back to the building you used to live in, used to share a flat with two animals: a cat and a frog.

You knock and you wait.

Francis Bonnefoy, barefoot, opens the door. He hasn't changed at all, unfortunately, and he doesn't seem surprised to see you.

"I'm only here for the night, Frog," you say, and tossing your duffel bag onto the leather sofa – _that_ wasn't there before – and sweeping a glance across the room. There is some sort of comfort in seeing that those annoyingly candid pictures of you writing are still sitting framed on a bookshelf. "Where is Henry?"

"You wound me!" said Bonnefoy, raising a hand to his chest. "So many years of friendship, and I am still second to that menace!" He turns his head, just so his hair falls artfully on his shoulders, and so his left side – _his "good" side_ – was the most of what you could make of him. The way he turns his torso caused his shirt to flair just _so_ in the air before falling back into place. Everything is scripted, staged, sculpted to the aesthetics of a film hoping to hit the big time.

You remember why you hated him.

The cat is hiding atop the desk (in _your_ room), and it accepts being lifted into your arms, just this once. You don't care that you'll be covered in cat fur tomorrow, as you lay down (on _your_ bed). Your bones ache, and your hands shake. You are asleep in minutes (and you have a dream about yourself, for the first time – you see yourself in London and in New York, as you were, and then you see yourself on the road again, and slowly but surely forgetting why movement and new sights made you so happy to begin with; you see the world spinning and swiftly tilting, and being carried off by mighty winds to the skies with everyone else) and do not wake until the next morning. To spite the Frog, you leave the flat a mess: you neglect to make your bed, dump your old (and very dirty, you now realize) clothes on the floor, and steal things from the refrigerator on your way out.

You withdraw some more money from the bank and stop by Yao Wang's office again to sign some papers before you take a bus to Atlantic City.

It surprises you that you can still feel a thrill thrum through your skin as you watch the world whip past the windows in the bus. The other passengers are asleep, despite the sun's steady rise. To pass the time you look onto the road and imagine a man leaping and running to keep up with you – like you did when you were younger, and your mum was still driving you places. It was something you had grown out of once you'd started taking the Tube instead.

Sometimes, you imagine that it is a red pick-up truck driving to keep up, running over anything with the misfortune of immobility in its way.

Somewhere on the way, you discover a notebook in an old coat you had stuffed into your bag. It is only half-filled with your script – you had been in the middle of writing a story about a man moving to the city, looking for change. You hadn't the heart to finish or take the journal with you when you left. You read through it: the young man meets adventure and magic in the city, street life mingling with the fantastical. There are selkies in the harbor, ghouls in the sewers, ghosts walking with the living (strange that you'd missed this in your observations of New York City).

You'd never written anything like it before. Your earlier novels had all been firmly grounded on a juxtaposition of reality and mind-made delusion, of absolute and authentic freedom. Nearly all of them had been about an escape.

Only a quarter of what you've written in your notebook so far doesn't make you cringe, and it makes a familiar pride rush forward to your fingers. _I don't have a pen,_ you think at them uselessly. Your hands still itch.

You turn to the woman across the aisle. She's put her bag on the seat next to her, and a sudoku puzzle book is sitting with it. Excellent. When she lifts her head to your attempts to catch her attention, you realize that she's gorgeous. Her face is sharply angled, and her legs go on forever.

Her hair is blonde, and her eyes blue. You think someone Up Above (if not Down Below or beneath the earth) is a sadist.

(Or it could just be Alfred, still chasing you someway, somehow, from across the country. But something clinical in you – entirely separate from your initial denial – still forbids the idea. Destiny is a comfort to anyone but you.)

The woman gives you her pen readily enough and keeps attempting to start a conversation, her eyes taking on the familiar shine of interest. You feel too tired to give anything more than polite replies, and instead write until she quiets into subtle glances. You cover six pages with your (appallingly deteriorated) writing by the time you reach your destination. The woman says you can keep the pen, and disappears into the city.

When you get out and see the lights, you know it: it is the same as New York and London and New Orleans and all the other places that you've ever been before. You begin to wonder when you had started being so unhappy with the thought of ghosts – the ephemeral and the forgotten.

_But still lingering, _says someone, something, some part of you. It continues:

You are standing where any number of thousands or millions of people have stood before. They and those around you are ghosts that disappear from strangers' lives, just to fill their cups of rose and wine to the brim before downing them and falling into their graves or into ashes. You are a greater ghost than they, flitting from one place to the next without giving or taking anything more than money and time.

There is a quiet before you leave your hotel room where you recreate yet another scene out of a book: instead of staring up above to the ceiling, you look into a mirror, and you notice that you look different, though you aren't entirely sure how: there are no particularly deep lines and ridges on your face – it is as round as ever, hammered into severity only by thick eyebrows that you consciously rub outwards. Your hair is wild, unbecoming of the dress shirt you'd tossed into your duffel (all the creases obsessively erased from everything but memory after you'd discovered the iron in the hotel room's closet).

You look like yourself, you think, but different. Not as wrong as you did before.

The thought is not explored before you close the door behind you and leave for the casino, where you share a poker table with a man who looks very much like a young Paul McCartney, a Korean woman whose drink of choice was sherry, and a man wearing an interesting pair of orange trousers – among other characters, though these sat with you longest and thus exhibited the least shame as they grew more and more inebriated. Paul McCartney eventually wins three of their games and does indeed jump onto the table singing (screaming) the last three minutes of Hey Jude, waving his arms as a conductor would when people from other tables hollered out a million _na_'s. You're drunk enough to sing with them, but definitely not enticed or attracted enough to make offers to let anyone into your heart (known in this day and age as a hotel room) and start to make things better. You'd do that by yourself, thank you very much.

Make things better for yourself, that is.

You enjoy (really enjoy, for once) something of Atlantic City that night, and you return alone to your hotel room with nearly the same amount of money that you had left with, tired with some kind of happiness that you haven't felt in years.

The next morning, you take a train to Philadelphia (scouring their Museum of Art: you see a painting, full of curling blues, greens, and something that looks like a ship. It reminds you of something, though you can't quite figure what it is) and move on towards Washington D.C. (to sit in the Library of Congress, watching its vastness swallow you and thousands of books and titles whole: you didn't do this last time) after.

You end up moving West, rather than chasing South as you had before.

You see it all again: the way a woman's leg curved differently from a man's, the balance on the edge of a dice before the inevitable fall and roar, the glimmer of water in the light of the sun or the moon. In the evenings, you commit the images to memory, tracing them in words on a notebook that you (too) soon fill with a scrawl that grows closer and closer to human script as the nights pass. You buy a cheap spiral notebook with _Star Wars _on its front because it's much better than the one with kittens sprawled all over (though you will admit that your gaze lingered).

This one is a quieter beginning. And you're happier for it, you think.


	7. viii

**viii. see in the dark**

The entire week is relatively silent – something you hadn't realized that you had grown used to before the world had slowed its spinning by a few million kilometers per hour. But more than anything, it surprises you that it actually takes Alfred that entire week to make himself known again – this time, it is he that calls you. You're taking a walk through town, neon casting a sharp light against your skin in the dead of night. The streets are empty, its hunters and lives mingling in dim rooms, but you feel the pulsing of parties in the dark, beckoning. You don't feel the desire to enter a club or find heat tangled in the sheets with someone: it feels wrong, somehow.

You walk past those clubs and pubs, into the cold tonight, and the quiet only mildly shaken by the sound of made-up life. The trees seem to be filled with light, and the houses shimmer in the river. It's nice.

And then there is ringing, from across the street. There's no one else around to pick it up, so you cross, glancing both ways as you go, out of habit – the only cars out are pressed into a row before the bars and the shops.

There is no doubt in your mind that the call is meant for you. There was a time that the knowledge would have made you leave town at the first ring. You wonder why now is different.

You pick up. Alfred speaks before you do.

"That was a low blow, Artie."

"What was?"

"Taking an airplane. That's _cheating_."

"I didn't think we'd established any rules, love."

"… I like that. Love. You've never called me that before."

"Our conversations haven't exactly been friendly."

"This one is."

"Which is why I called you 'love'. Keep up."

"You haven't exactly made it easy."

"'_Go big or go home_', I think it's said."

"I think that's our relationship in a nutshell."

You chuckle at that, and you surprise yourself with the sound. It's new, but familiar.

"_Hey_! You're laughing!"

When you blink, you think that you see his smile in the darkness. It is a warm shape, genuine in make. You are quiet for a moment, and a familiar tugging is pulling your mind and your chest from the empty milkyway street to a pick-up truck moving in your direction.

"Does this mean you're going to let me do it again? Make you laugh, I mean. I'd really like that. I'd really like to meet you for real – no, I'd really just like to love you properly." His voice is desperately hopeful and terribly exhausted. It is so different from all the other times you've heard him speak: everything about the man that chased you across the states had been _cocky_. He wasn't supposed to be soft or to _whine_: and you realize that there is something childlike there.

This is new.

"I know that I scared you, with the last few calls. S'not like I said it nicely. Looking back on it now, I must have sounded like a complete creeper—"

"I'm still afraid, Alfred. And I'm quite sure that I always will be, though it may not be for the reason you think," you speak honestly, because it's what he deserves. You think of all the towns and cities you've passed and all the kilometers you've killed since he's started following you. For Christ's sake, you think of the gasoline prices and the way the fumes would melt air in a haze in the deserts down south. You spent a long time there, alone, and so did he. You imagine that Alfred had a life before all of this.

There is silence on the other end, or something close to it. You can hear music playing softly; strange for the fact that it's a song you know is meant to be screamed at the sky or into someone's ear at parties. Alfred's thinking is practically tangible over this: _you're afraid of loving me, aren't you? i'd be so good for you, arthur, and you'd be so good for me, but the only way we could ever be sure about it is to be together, so if you just waited for me, we could find out._

"Fair enough," he says finally before sighing and quieting once more. The conflict in that hits you from so far away, but you allow him to think.

Alfred makes two false starts before speaking again.

"I'm getting close to where you are. Just about to hit town."

Alfred sounds like he is going to say something else, but instead hangs up.


	8. ix and x

**ix. we've got possibilities**

It is the same as before: you feel it when a pick-up truck winds its way into the town by the river. Out of habit, you take off at a brisk pace, headed towards the small hotel you'd checked into for the night. You'd been planning to leave and to get out of Tennessee in the morning. However, you feel less endangered now and more like you'd just been handed an ultimatum. The difference lies in the face of truth: you have reasons to stay and to be met with a man who claims to be the equivalent of your soulmate and has chased you all over the United States.

It doesn't sound appealing, put that way.

Despite its constant crucifixion in the light of love (within fiction), doubts are often as valid as any logical reason: it is habit to wonder and wander. You know close to nothing about Alfred – only that he enjoys listening to the Eagles, and that his goal of following you and loving you is twisted and insane. But there is no denying the tugging in your own chest, the rope or string always trailing behind you; this growing taut or loose with your movement and his. Ignoring what you've already noticed is too difficult: your last conversation with him was life, and not a construct of your imagination, printed and published on a million pages.

Alfred F. Jones is not a character: he is a human, with all of his own complexities that haven't yet been revealed in the minimal words you've allowed him to give you. He is a young man, whose past year you've probably ruined assuming that he isn't indeed a psychopath deluded into believing that you are his true love and now wants to either murder you or rape you.

The thought is discarded at the memory of a small sigh over the telephone.

No. You cannot disregard that Alfred will not catch you unless you allow him to; that Alfred is letting you pick the game, and he is going to accept all of the rules you'd alter, no matter how unfair or tiring. His admission of this unspoken law so late is almost a surrender in itself – and it hurts you and it endears him to you.

Is this love?

Perhaps.

Perhaps not.

Kicking the door to your hotel room behind you (and beginning to fold the clothes that you had slung over the obligatory chair-and-desk ensemble at the corner of the room), you think to yourself, _what do you want?_

You think, _make a decision._

You think, well what makes this so different from all the other times that you've skipped town at a moment's notice? What is stopping you from running again? Why not leave again?

_Everything_, something answers. Everything is stopping you. You are tired of running, of slipping beyond the world's reach to evade the kind of death that comes inevitably to all. You'd like for once to be happy and break from this world – perhaps differently from how you'd first imagined, seated with hands bleached by the screen of an ancient laptop. You'd like very much to live, perhaps to love and ease the old pains in your chest that seem to drag behind you, pushed forward only by a lonely boy and his pick-up truck.

Destiny moves in mysterious ways, if it does exist. You and Alfred F. Jones are doubtlessly bound by heartlines and phone calls, if not by the way your blood sings when you feel that he may be near, by the sheer attraction and fear that come together when you speak.

Would loving a complete stranger be so bad?, you wonder.

Not if it was Alfred. You are sure of it.

But there are so many more questions that follow: Is now the time? Are you ready to meet Alfred F. Jones? Has your heart (though it's really just your limbic system) managed to accept some kind of change only in a week? Can you possibly be ready for an existence beyond solitude after years of only yourself to concern yourself with? Are you—

**x. grace inside a sound**

There is a knock.

It is heavy, determined, and a million things that you have come to know in the time you've been running through the world. The knock has tired legs, but sticks resolutely to the air, tailing its own sound until it echoes far into your mind.

Chasing.

Waiting.

You imagine blond hair and blue eyes beneath your eyelids, and in the darkness, you see for the first time an angular jaw, rectangular glasses slipping down a straight nose. Breathing brings the scent of sweat and leather, all hanging on broad shoulders. Without bending your spine or your ear to the door, you hear almost shallow breaths and weight jumping up and down on the balls of feet from the three a.m. hallway.

The carpet muffles the sound of your feet as you stand and you walk to the door, but there is no silence still. Your own blood thrumming beneath your skin, your breath filling and swelling your chest, your mind still drowned by all this and a simple sound: knocking, over and over again. Your body _pulls_, and everything _aches_ with life and what may grow to be _love_.

You raise your hand to the handle.

You open the door.

**End.**

**Note: **It took me a very long time to decide where to end this (and thus, a very long time to complete this relatively short story! This was being written on-and-off for about four months, along with another USUK Les Misérables crossover I'd abandoned halfway through. Wowza!)

As I said in my first note, this is less a love story, and more of a story wherein Arthur learns to move forward – this question always double-slapped me in the face: is Arthur's _meeting_ Alfred or _choosing_ to meet Alfred the culmination of what he's gone through? My debates eventually concluded that it was the latter.

That being said, I am considering making a bonus ending with which some readers will doubtlessly be more satisfied – though it may depend on how many would actually want to read one.

All that aside, I would like to thank _you_. Yes, you – person on a laptop or on a phone or something like that. I appreciate your readership, be it silent, scathing, or spirited. I appreciate it in more ways than ten. Really, really.

-Squingili


	9. an epilogue

**TRANSCRIPT:**

_SBC 108.2 Radio Interview with Arthur Kirkland_

_by Gillian Harper (GILLIAN)_

START.

GH: Our guest today is definitely no stranger to the bestseller lists – if I'm not mistaken, his name has taken residence in them since 2004.

AK: I'm afraid I wouldn't know enough to correct you.

GH: Well, regardless of years and dates, he debuted with the story of _Augustine_, a runaway who finds the bright end of nowhere – and everywhere – when she accidentally steps into a cathouse. Shooting in quick succession after her, are _The Roses_, _Devil Take the Hindmost_, and _Three_ _Wednesdays_. And for years, we had for a bookend the breathtaking _Empire_, which still holds the world captive with the story of Percy, a man with one foot in reality and the other in fantasy. Nearly all of these have been made into movies – and these movies have indeed snapped up a few Oscars. Coming out this fall, however, is _The City, Revisited_, which we'll be talking more about a little later. All of these are the extraordinary brain-children of Arthur Kirkland, who I am very happy to say is here with us today. [_applause SFX_]

AK: It is a pleasure to be here again, Gillian.

GH: It's definitely been a while – I think the last time was when _Empire_'d just come out.

AK: It was a very long time ago, and I do apologize for that.

GH: Well, you're here now, so I s'pose all's forgiven! How have you been keeping?

AK: I've been keeping quite busy, if I do say so myself. I'd spent years just travelling, and going back to business was a bit of a shock at first – especially with the explosion that followed.

GH: Honey, you were kind of asking for it after taking off like that.

AK: [_chuckles_] I suppose I was.

GH: But really, you scared the bejeezus out of everyone with that stunt! You were always really active on Twitter and your blog, and bam!: six months of zero activity. I think it took your entire publishing house to calm everyone down by saying you'd just gone on a spontaneous holiday, which really just made the controversy and conspiracy blow to epic proportions.

AK: Along with sales.

GH: [_laughs_]

AK: But really, nothing was sugarcoated or—or done for publicity. It was, in all seriousness, a spontaneous holiday. I'd spent five years straight just churning out four different novels, and at that point, my brains were probably spilling out of my ears. I needed a change of scenery.

GH: Wait – four books. Straight. In five years. You're joking.

AK: I would never. Surely you must have noticed how quickly the books were coming out.

GH: I assumed that you were working on some of them way before _Augustine_ made her big entrance.

AK: Not at all. I had a tendency of gathering skeletons of stories, and when I wanted to be productive, I simply gave them flesh and blood until they breathed lives of their own. Not a particularly pretty metaphor, but it will do.

GH: Would you say that you'd run out of skeletons before you left, though? What made you really decide to take off?

AK: I'm always full of stories – everyone is, I think. But by the time I'd finished _Empire, _everything about telling them made me feel too raw and tired. On impulse, I went on an overnight in Atlantic City, which really just snowballed into a monster trek across America and back.

GH: And by the time you came back, all of us fans – we were on our knees.

AK: Now _you're_ joking.

GH: I'm not! I track your tag on Tumblr – don't judge me – and one night, I was up late doing research on my guest for the next day, when the entire tag was suddenly flooded with posts that were just plain keysmash. And when I tried to find a coherent post about what was going on. It wasn't about the trailer that'd just been released for film adaptation for _Empire_, oh no, it was about your blog update!

AK: No.

GH: I'd read them all out for you, but I'm afraid we don't have the time!

AK: I'll find out anyway. Alfred's listening in right now, and he'll probably be looking it all up later, grinning from ear to ear. I won't hear the end of it when I get home next week.

GH: Alfred?

AK: We live together.

GH: Now _that_ must be interesting for him.

AK: I do my best, though when I'm not out talking to my editor or promoting my novel, I've really just been writing at home all day. I'm fortunate to have him around to keep me from going mad.

GH: How long have you known each other?

AK: Not very long at all, though I can confirm that he isn't a serial killer.

GH: Oh, was he already a fan of yours when you met?

AK: He knew about me before I knew about him, yes.

GH: Well, I'm pretty sure a million fans would pay to be in his place right around now: _The City, Revisited_ comes out in just a month! Is there anything you can tell us?

AK: It's about a young man – Alex – who's fresh out of job. He chases change to a city he'd always dreamed of living in after he visited it with his parents as a child.

GH: He moves there quite spontaneously.

AK: _Quite_ spontaneously. Well. Alex finds out that the city is a lot different from when it was when he first visited. Like most people, he sees that it's all a lot smaller than he remembers. He's there for months and months before he realizes that nothing's changed about himself even after he's gone to renew himself. And then he discovers something: the city is full of ghosts and ghouls and all sorts of things. Selkies in the harbor, dullahans riding about on motorcycles, dwarves hiding in the sewers. Creatures from all over the world, congregated into one place, living their own lives. And at one point, a skin-walker named Franklin comes to town and sets about looking for Alex.

GH: And you've said in other interviews that this is radically different from your previous work.

AK: It is my first foray into fantasy, after all. I'll admit that I was a bit hesitant to put this one out.

GH: Would you say that the theme has changed as well? All of your other novels have been about some form of escape: like how Augustine ran away from her very very traditional family, or how The Roses chose to break from what the world thought of them, as ex-convicts and everything, to live however they wanted.

AK: I suppose it has. I do believe now that some things are possible when you stay where you are. Little destinies and magics that we often miss when we try so hard to escape. It's something we learn the hard way, and these things normally have to chase us down before we're willing to listen.

GH: And did you learn it the hard way, if I may ask?

AK: You have no idea.

GH: [laughs] Well, there you have it, folks. We have just had the latest on the most-awaited novel of the year by Mr. Arthur Kirkland himself. _The City, Revisited _is out in bookstores on July 14 – I am very sad to say that we are out of time for now. Thank you so much for being here today, Arthur.

AK: Thank you for having me.

GH: This is Gillian for SBC 108.2, and I have had the great pleasure of speaking to Arthur Kirkland today. After the break, Nachomax will be back to playing the top forty on the billboard hits. Have a fantastic day!

END.

* * *

_AN EXCERPT FROM A DOCUMENT IN THE LAPTOP OF ARTHUR J. KIRKLAND:_

They were tawny in the darkness, but there was no doubt in Alex's mind that the giant bird of prey's feathers would be gold in the sunlight – in the distance, he could see that the first splashes of orange had touched the horizon, the little sparks lining the sharp, curved beak and the wickedly sharp talons. Vicious and beautiful, in the way that a blade was as it arced down onto skin.

And yet it merely watched him from its place on the window sill, making no move to enter the room from the night. Alex felt numbness in his fingers, like aftershocks of the simple act of opening a window.

They were both still until, before his eyes, the eagle became a man with tawny hair, leaning tiredly against the wall.

"Room service," said Franklin – for that was who he was, and it couldn't have possibly been anyone else in the world. No one else who could be that tired, who could have crossed the continent as quickly as he had searching for something. Searching for Alex.

There was no need for introductions. Alex couldn't quite manage words, anyway – what exactly were you supposed to say to someone who had featured prominently in waking fears? – and motioned for Franklin to enter, shutting the window as the skin-walker trudged heavily into the room before falling heavily upon the sofa.

"Out of all the cities in all the states in all of America," he groaned, "you moved into mine. Do you have any idea how hard it is to double back once you've literally hit the coast on the other side of the country? I couldn't exactly take a plane back, you know."

_Not with all the trouble to the West _went unsaid.

"How was I supposed to know that you'd already hit the coast?" were the first words out of Alex's mouth in this entire conversation, and he figured that they weren't as bad as they could have been. Remarking that Franklin was in fact a breathing human being would not have endeared him to the almost-stranger.

(Though a part of Alex is unreasonably certain that nothing he could have said would shake the skin-walker from the path he'd resolutely kept to for Christ knows how long.)

"The same way I knew that you moved into my city."

"But _how_?" Alex gestured wildly to the room around him uselessly before slumping down onto his armchair. "None of this should be possible. You can't have just _known_ about me without anyone telling you. I may not even be who you think I am. I could be nobody of importance. Everything that's happened since that first phone call could have been an accident and–"

"—I'm here, aren't I?" Franklin interrupted, sitting straight in his seat. His eyes were an obscene blue, and they bore into him in ways that terrified. "I'm here, and you're here. That's that."

"But how do you _know_?"

Know of expectations and fulfillment.

"I don't," Franklin said simply. "But none of what's coming next would be half as fun if we'd had an ending written out for us in the beginning. Is that enough for you?"

It wasn't. It never would be.

In the lamplight, there was no difference to the darkness, but Alex knew in his heart of hearts that, come the morning, the insidious thing he had come to see out of the very corner of his eyes would not be the same. The fear – the burden, perhaps – of becoming yet another ghost to haunt the city could be shared and eased if he allowed it.

"Well," said Alex, "I suppose it's a start."

Man and myth sat, the colors of dawn crowns upon their heads.

**End.**

**Notes:** Well, if I thought writing the story was difficult, then this sort-of epilogue was tons worse. I hit a dead end when I realized that there was absolutely no way of writing anything after that last part without ruining the tone that I'd set: there was a new world opened with that door, and I suppose that it simply included us, as an audience, as well - which would explain the lack of perspective from Arthur himself. I hope you're all not too disappointed.

I was expecting this story to end very much in the same way it began: quietly, and unnoticed. I cannot begin to express just how ecstatic I was when I woke up to so many reviews for the last part posted. Thank you all again so much for taking the time to read my story! (Especially Sakushiro and the two anons)

I also made a short playlist of sorts for this fic. Again, it will only be available if people are actually interested.

Until next time!


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